


Don't Talk to Strangers

by BigScaryDinos



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Blood, Dark Will Graham, Illnesses, Mental Instability, Not Beta Read, Short One Shot, Someone Help Will Graham, Time Skips, Will Graham Has Encephalitis, set during season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-08-29 22:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16752355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BigScaryDinos/pseuds/BigScaryDinos
Summary: (set during season 1)Will Graham is out for a ride. It's two am. What could possibly go wrong?





	Don't Talk to Strangers

 

The world is different at two am; quiet maybe. The harsh edges become blunted and blurred, the missteps of the day fade away into a soft whisper of nothingness. The blanket of fog coats the small town and kisses the ground, it’s damp lips pressed softly against the pavement.

 

The green light flickers in the haze back to yellow, then red. Will doesn’t try to rush, simply accelerates and then pushes himself through at a steady clip. His hands and feet are on autopilot, with the world around him absorbing him in a way that should seem frightening - a blanket wrapped around the mouth of an infant helpless in his crib. Instead there is a comfort to it; allowing himself to dissolve into the darkness. Become nameless and faceless in a way he's lost over time.

 

There seems to be a fist sized hole inside his head within which a vortex lives and swirls dangerously. It consumes and consumes and consumes without mercy or care. The events of tonight; for example, are lost forever inside the whirlwind. He woke up in the car.

 

He should go to the hospital, he knows. People say there’s nothing wrong with him, and he can understand that the scans and blood work and tests - they’ve shown nothing at all. He's drawn clocks, been swallowed inside the mouth of a great machine, gave nothing short of a gallon of blood. But something is _wrong_ with him. The trees bend and twist under the weight of the snow, they dance like people twenty feet tall and caught in a clumsy pirouette.

 

He should go to the emergency room he thinks even as the thought fades. It has no weight. It carries none of the normal cadence of his normal process. He drives, instead through the darkened roads.

 

Pieces of his mind fall off in chunks, it’s own decay noticed but left unchecked. He’s tried rest and relaxation and still he wakes up in the middle of an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar feelings. Unfamiliar tastes coating his enamel. Unfamiliar feelings taking root. Unfamiliarity breeding a new person inside of his shell.

 

He thinks of guns and blood and stag heads. He thinks of his eyes cooking like eggs inside his head; the sizzle and pop he imagines hearing that would be his brain as bacon. A fry pan coated in thick grease while he fails to suffer any more or less.

 

He wakes up hot and sees the lights of another intersection, lazy blinking yellow. Caution. His life is yellow. Caution, danger, beware,  slow down. Blinking and clicking, there are no cars on the road other than his. His sweaty palms tighten on the wheel and he accelerates through.  In the rear-view he can still see the yellow burning through the haze. It’s two thirty. He’s lost time. Again. _My name is Will Graham, it's two thirty, I'm in..._ there is no answer. He isn't sure where he is. Reston, maybe.

 

He sees a man walking on the road; from the mile away he is now it looks like he’s in an army green trench coat. His pants dark, his hair dark, the only reflective is the green and even that is barely afloat in the sea of precipitation. Will struggles to keep his eyes open, struggles with the tapeworm eating every moment inside his brain.  He knows he should drive himself to the hospital, instead it’s his turn signal he hits and he slows to a crawl behind the man, walking at his own even pace.

 

 _Why is he out so late _._   _He approaches and looks through his own fog, his own glassy eyes coated in illness he’s sure he has undiagnosed.

 

Will pursues and sees that the man isn’t wearing a trench coat, it’s a suit jacket. His pants a match. Will can’t see his face, down to the ground. He rolls down his window.

 

_Do you need a ride?_

 

There is no answer, his face turns  a quarter to the side. Will keeps his foot on the gas his hands white knuckled on the wheel. His shirt is soaking with sweat.

 

_Do you need a ride?_

 

Louder. The man stops, Will stops. It’s softer outside, dim with only one streetlight burning above them. The man touches the car door, opens, gets inside. His face hidden, hidden away. It's so sudden, so quick. It was like a planned moment buried deeply inside a well practiced play.

 

_Where are you going?_

 

No answer, so Will just drives. When he get where he needs to be he knows the man will tell him. He accelerates. He wishes he’d never picked the man up, never stopped, never bothered. He feels clustered, impacted. This person sharing his personal space ruins things for him. Wears him down like a painful suit.

 

_Who are you?_

 

The clock says two forty two. He turns towards the man who turns towards him - finally. Shadows play across his face, meld and mold and take shapes that aren't human. His face is a mask over a mask over a mask. He’s not real, not a real person.

 

It’s Hannibal. It’s Jack. It’s himself. It’s Garrett. It’s his father and mother. It’s everyone and nobody at all once. The face morphs, melds until it’s just a black ghost in his passenger seat. It's nothing and everything at the same time. It may be god with antlers far too large to fit inside of his car they break free. The magnificent rack stretches upwards and upwards cracking through his windows.

 

_It’s Hannibal._

 

It opens his mouth, human shaped with thin lips and white teeth glittering off the streetlights, but it doesn’t stop. It never stops.  It is a shark with endless possibilities.

 

_What big teeth you have._

_The better to eat you with ._

 

It’s not a mouth it’s cave and it turns his head inside out, twists it until there is nothing left, no more head, no more face - just endless mouth with rows and rows and rows of sharp teeth.

  


**click**

  


Will looks at the light, flickering yellow off and on, off and on. Caution. Beware. Danger. Slow.  He slows for a second, notes no one else around this early in the morning and pushes himself through the intersection. The clock on his dashboard reads four ten. He is alone in his car. Lost time eaten up with big hulking bites.

 

The fog is lifting, his shirt is drenched and his air is on. He shakes his damp hair from his face letting out one long shaky breath. He should go to the hospital, drive himself there now and never look back.  His mouth tasted like cooper. No one else sits in his passenger seat. His hands are wet.

 

A deep dark crimson stained them, even the cracks between each fingers, his whirls and swirls of each fingertip are coated with thick and viscous red.  His steering wheel matches, his fingerprints guilty on all the surfaces of his car. Splatters of blood coated him, his shirt, his arms, his seats.

 

The sky was lightening. Will drives home.


End file.
